The play has always been the thing for Michael Kahn, artistic director of Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. “I knew I wanted to be a director at age five,” he says. “I can remember because I went to a Quaker school, and they allowed me to direct my first play in the first grade.” That performance, a rather boisterous production of Jack Frost and the Snowflakes, clearly set the stage for Kahn’s critically acclaimed career. And his well-earned reputation in and beyond Washington as a director of classical plays—especially the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and of more recent giants such as Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams—is certain to be enhanced this fall with the opening of the Shakespeare Theatre’s new home on 6th Street in downtown Washington.
“We’re building Sidney Harman Hall,” says Kahn, “which we expect to open Oct. 1, and which—added to the existing Lansburgh Theatre—will become the Harman Center for the Arts. [Sidney Harman Hall is under construction at 6th and F streets, NW; the Lansburgh is on 7th and E streets, NW.] Both theaters will be the home of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Our new theater is large”— 775 seats, compared with the Lansburgh’s 451—“yet no seat is farther back than the last row in the theater we have now.”
The new space will be state-of-the-art, thanks to businessman-philanthropist Sidney Harman, husband of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and co-founder of Harman-Kardon, an upscale audio equipment company. Kahn says the new theater’s amenities will allow the Shakespeare Theatre Company “… to do a lot of things scenically that we can’t do right now, and give us the opportunity to produce more plays. In addition to the fact that we can expand our repertory, we’re also going to be able to host ballet, opera, chamber music and dance in these two theaters.”
Among the groups that will perform at the Harman Center are the Washington Ballet, CityDance Ensemble, the Washington Performing Arts Society and the Washington Bach Consort. With nearly every night at both theaters booked, downtown D.C.’s already hopping Penn Quarter is sure to get even livelier.
The Harman Center for the Arts is a key element of the company’s plan to make Washington an arts destination, rather than just a magnet for monument crawls. Kahn also wants to see the company—which performed in Athens, Greece (by invitation of the Greek government) in 2003 and at Stratford-upon-Avon in England in 2006—embark on more international tours.
The years since Kahn’s precocious directorial debut—a number not easy to verify because decades ago, he admits, he purposely “fudged” his age—contain many notable achievements, running the gamut from off-off Broadway, Broadway, to outdoor theaters in a number of cities where, in addition to dramatic works, he also directed musicals and operas. Born in New York (where he went to the High School for the Performing Arts and Columbia University), Kahn has been a faculty member at Juilliard since its founding in 1968 and was the director of its drama division from 1992 to 2006.
The long list of his former Juilliard students includes William Hurt, Laura Linney, Harvey Keitel, Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, Robin Williams and the late Christopher Reeve. Other notable actors who have performed under Kahn include Stacy Keach, Kelly McGillis, Hal Holbrook and Dixie Carter. Kahn has also taught and directed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., and the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn.
His artistic efforts in D.C. are yielding results, too: “We’ve noticed in the last couple of years that 20 percent of our audience is from outside the greater Washington area. That was especially true of our Shakespeare in Washington celebration that closed in June. We hope we can spearhead, or be a catalyst, for getting people from outside Washington to know what a rich cultural experience they can have here. And, it’s not just us. It’s the opera, the ballet, the other theaters, the museums, the dance companies and the chamber music. Washington offers an extraordinarily rich cultural experience. In a city that’s not been able to keep a secret, it’s been able to keep this one for a very long time.”
Kahn believes that jointly sponsored ventures bode well for the entire city. “The Shakespeare in Washington celebration, which we curated along with Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center, began to get the city to see that culture is both an engine for tourism and an economic engine for the city.”
Coming from someone else, that might sound like Falstaffian puffery. But Kahn has a long history of building audiences for classical drama. In 1969 he was appointed artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theatre, directing 20 productions there. Five years later, he was named producing director of the McCarter Theatre. In 1992, he directed his 100th production; today, he estimates the total is around 150.
Michael Kahn’s Washington connection began in 1986 when the Shakespeare Theatre broke from the Folger Shakespeare Library and he was hired as the theater’s artistic director. During that period Kahn won—for his direction of Twelfth Night, featuring Kelly McGillis—the first of his five Helen Hayes awards. Six years later, the company moved to its present location in the old Lansburgh Department Store building on 7th Street.
With the new Sidney Harman Hall and the existing Lansburgh, Kahn will have options like he’s never had before. “For the first time ever,” he says, “we’re going to be doing plays in rep, which means you can see two plays in one day, and since we’ll also have a play at the Lansburgh, you’ll be able to see three plays over a weekend by our company. And that, too, should be a magnet for folks from out of town.”
For the past 16 summers, the Washington Shakespeare Company has offered a draw for folks in town with an innovation called Free For All at Carter Barron. More than 30,000 locals turned out for the inaugural play, a revival of The Merry Wives of Windsor starring Paul Winfield, in 1991. Later that summer, the production of Twelfth Night with McGillis attracted a record-breaking audience of 50,547 during its two-week run. Since its inception, Free For All productions have been seen by more than 500,000 people.
A proud Kahn says, “Very often, accessibility and price prevent a lot of people from coming to the theater, so when we have 3,000 people at Carter Barron laughing at Shakespeare, we know the audience for classical drama is out there. We’re very eager to open our theater up to a wider audience, so we will sell 10 percent of our seats at $10. We’ve received a generous investment from the city, and part of that was our promise to make theater more affordable and accessible. Why do we do it? Because we believe these plays were written for everybody, about everybody, and should be read, seen and heard by everybody.”